ABOUT THIS BOOK

In this audacious book, Ana María Ochoa Gautier explores how listening has been central to the production of notions of language, music, voice, and sound that determine the politics of life. Drawing primarily from nineteenth-century Colombian sources, Ochoa Gautier locates sounds produced by different living entities at the juncture of the human and nonhuman. Her "acoustically tuned" analysis of a wide array of texts reveals multiple debates on the nature of the aural. These discussions were central to a politics of the voice harnessed in the service of the production of different notions of personhood and belonging. In Ochoa Gautier's groundbreaking work, Latin America and the Caribbean emerge as a historical site where the politics of life and the politics of expression inextricably entangle the musical and the linguistic, knowledge and the sensorial.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Ana María Ochoa Gautier is Associate Professor of Music and Director of the Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University. She is the author of several books in Spanish.

REVIEWS

"Speaking from the intersection of sound studies, Latin American studies, and the history of natural history and musicology, this book shifts the terrain upon which all of those fields have comfortably settled. Scholars of sound studies will need to take note of Ochoa’s challenges to European or North American framings."

-- Alejandra Bronfman Hispanic American Historical Review

“Gautier’s work is tremendously useful. A challenging and rewarding read, I recommend her work to persons who are seriously interested in new approaches to retelling the history of any nation.”

-- Julian Ledford AmeriQuests

"Aurality is a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of sound studies. Ana Marıa Ochoa Gautier adeptly guides the reader across complex scales of analysis using well-selected historical case studies.... Aurality achieves its goal of establishing a critical vantage point for making sense of the contemporary transformations that are shaping the 21st."

-- William Hope American Ethnologist

"Ochoa Gautier provides a vitally important account of the intricate and heterogeneous modes of knowing, being, becoming, and belonging that continue to resonate in the postcolonial lettered city."

-- Leonardo Cardoso American Anthropologist

"The volume is a must for enthusiasts of sound studies and/or Colombian history. Ochoa Gautier has done a fine job chronicling the way in which the aural played a key role in the definition of a relation between humankind and the body politics of the nation-state. It deserves wide recognition and ample endorsement."

-- Héctor Fernández L'Hoeste EIAL

"This book raises important questions about the role of sound and efforts to categorise it in defining the relationship between the human and the non-human, and between different social groups within Colombian society.... Aurality will undoubtedly serve the specialist researcher well and it is to be hoped that the rich lines of inquiry it opens up will receive further attention in future."

-- Anna Cant Journal of Latin American Studies

"Aurality is a rich and complex book that raises important questions about colonialism and modernity, personhood and nation. Ochoa Gautier has made an important contribution to Colombian historiography, certainly meeting her aim to explore 'the relationship between listening and the voice as a part of the history of the relation between the colonial and the modern'. . . . It will be difficult to read history in the same way again."

-- Meri L. Clark The Latin Americanist

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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